Arrow Research search

Author name cluster

Qizhang Li

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

7 papers
2 author rows

Possible papers

7

NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Improved Generation of Adversarial Examples Against Safety-aligned LLMs

  • Qizhang Li
  • Yiwen Guo
  • Wangmeng Zuo
  • Hao Chen

Adversarial prompts (or say, adversarial examples) generated using gradient-based methods exhibit outstanding performance in performing automatic jailbreak attacks against safety-aligned LLMs. Nevertheless, due to the discrete nature of texts, the input gradient of LLMs struggles to precisely reflect the magnitude of loss change that results from token replacements in the prompt, leading to limited attack success rates against safety-aligned LLMs, even in the white-box setting. In this paper, we explore a new perspective on this problem, suggesting that it can be alleviated by leveraging innovations inspired in transfer-based attacks that were originally proposed for attacking black-box image classification models. For the first time, we appropriate the ideologies of effective methods among these transfer-based attacks, i. e. , Skip Gradient Method and Intermediate Level Attack, into gradient-based adversarial prompt generation and achieve significant performance gains without introducing obvious computational cost. Meanwhile, by discussing mechanisms behind the gains, new insights are drawn, and proper combinations of these methods are also developed. Our empirical results show that 87% of the query-specific adversarial suffixes generated by the developed combination can induce Llama-2-7B-Chat to produce the output that exactly matches the target string on AdvBench. This match rate is 33% higher than that of a very strong baseline known as GCG, demonstrating advanced discrete optimization for adversarial prompt generation against LLMs. In addition, without introducing obvious cost, the combination achieves >30% absolute increase in attack success rates compared with GCG when generating both query-specific (38% ->68%) and universal adversarial prompts (26. 68% -> 60. 32%) for attacking the Llama-2-7B-Chat model on AdvBench. Code at: https: //github. com/qizhangli/Gradient-based-Jailbreak-Attacks.

NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Improving Adversarial Transferability via Intermediate-level Perturbation Decay

  • Qizhang Li
  • Yiwen Guo
  • Wangmeng Zuo
  • Hao Chen

Intermediate-level attacks that attempt to perturb feature representations following an adversarial direction drastically have shown favorable performance in crafting transferable adversarial examples. Existing methods in this category are normally formulated with two separate stages, where a directional guide is required to be determined at first and the scalar projection of the intermediate-level perturbation onto the directional guide is enlarged thereafter. The obtained perturbation deviates from the guide inevitably in the feature space, and it is revealed in this paper that such a deviation may lead to sub-optimal attack. To address this issue, we develop a novel intermediate-level method that crafts adversarial examples within a single stage of optimization. In particular, the proposed method, named intermediate-level perturbation decay (ILPD), encourages the intermediate-level perturbation to be in an effective adversarial direction and to possess a great magnitude simultaneously. In-depth discussion verifies the effectiveness of our method. Experimental results show that it outperforms state-of-the-arts by large margins in attacking various victim models on ImageNet (+10. 07% on average) and CIFAR-10 (+3. 88% on average). Our code is at https: //github. com/qizhangli/ILPD-attack.

ICLR Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Making Substitute Models More Bayesian Can Enhance Transferability of Adversarial Examples

  • Qizhang Li
  • Yiwen Guo
  • Wangmeng Zuo
  • Hao Chen 0003

The transferability of adversarial examples across deep neural networks (DNNs) is the crux of many black-box attacks. Many prior efforts have been devoted to improving the transferability via increasing the diversity in inputs of some substitute models. In this paper, by contrast, we opt for the diversity in substitute models and advocate to attack a Bayesian model for achieving desirable transferability. Deriving from the Bayesian formulation, we develop a principled strategy for possible finetuning, which can be combined with many off-the-shelf Gaussian posterior approximations over DNN parameters. Extensive experiments have been conducted to verify the effectiveness of our method, on common benchmark datasets, and the results demonstrate that our method outperforms recent state-of-the-arts by large margins (roughly 19% absolute increase in average attack success rate on ImageNet), and, by combining with these recent methods, further performance gain can be obtained. Our code: https://github.com/qizhangli/MoreBayesian-attack.

ICLR Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Squeeze Training for Adversarial Robustness

  • Qizhang Li
  • Yiwen Guo
  • Wangmeng Zuo
  • Hao Chen 0003

The vulnerability of deep neural networks (DNNs) to adversarial examples has attracted great attention in the machine learning community. The problem is related to non-flatness and non-smoothness of normally obtained loss landscapes. Training augmented with adversarial examples (a.k.a., adversarial training) is considered as an effective remedy. In this paper, we highlight that some collaborative examples, nearly perceptually indistinguishable from both adversarial and benign examples yet show extremely lower prediction loss, can be utilized to enhance adversarial training. A novel method is therefore proposed to achieve new state-of-the-arts in adversarial robustness. Code: https://github.com/qizhangli/ST-AT.

NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Towards Evaluating Transfer-based Attacks Systematically, Practically, and Fairly

  • Qizhang Li
  • Yiwen Guo
  • Wangmeng Zuo
  • Hao Chen

The adversarial vulnerability of deep neural networks (DNNs) has drawn great attention due to the security risk of applying these models in real-world applications. Based on transferability of adversarial examples, an increasing number of transfer-based methods have been developed to fool black-box DNN models whose architecture and parameters are inaccessible. Although tremendous effort has been exerted, there still lacks a standardized benchmark that could be taken advantage of to compare these methods systematically, fairly, and practically. Our investigation shows that the evaluation of some methods needs to be more reasonable and more thorough to verify their effectiveness, to avoid, for example, unfair comparison and insufficient consideration of possible substitute/victim models. Therefore, we establish a transfer-based attack benchmark (TA-Bench) which implements 30+ methods. In this paper, we evaluate and compare them comprehensively on 10 popular substitute/victim models on ImageNet. New insights about the effectiveness of these methods are gained and guidelines for future evaluations are provided.

NeurIPS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Backpropagating Linearly Improves Transferability of Adversarial Examples

  • Yiwen Guo
  • Qizhang Li
  • Hao Chen

The vulnerability of deep neural networks (DNNs) to adversarial examples has drawn great attention from the community. In this paper, we study the transferability of such examples, which lays the foundation of many black-box attacks on DNNs. We revisit a not so new but definitely noteworthy hypothesis of Goodfellow et al. 's and disclose that the transferability can be enhanced by improving the linearity of DNNs in an appropriate manner. We introduce linear backpropagation (LinBP), a method that performs backpropagation in a more linear fashion using off-the-shelf attacks that exploit gradients. More specifically, it calculates forward as normal but backpropagates loss as if some nonlinear activations are not encountered in the forward pass. Experimental results demonstrate that this simple yet effective method obviously outperforms current state-of-the-arts in crafting transferable adversarial examples on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet, leading to more effective attacks on a variety of DNNs. Code at: https: //github. com/qizhangli/linbp-attack.

NeurIPS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Practical No-box Adversarial Attacks against DNNs

  • Qizhang Li
  • Yiwen Guo
  • Hao Chen

The study of adversarial vulnerabilities of deep neural networks (DNNs) has progressed rapidly. Existing attacks require either internal access (to the architecture, parameters, or training set of the victim model) or external access (to query the model). However, both the access may be infeasible or expensive in many scenarios. We investigate no-box adversarial examples, where the attacker can neither access the model information or the training set nor query the model. Instead, the attacker can only gather a small number of examples from the same problem domain as that of the victim model. Such a stronger threat model greatly expands the applicability of adversarial attacks. We propose three mechanisms for training with a very small dataset (on the order of tens of examples) and find that prototypical reconstruction is the most effective. Our experiments show that adversarial examples crafted on prototypical auto-encoding models transfer well to a variety of image classification and face verification models. On a commercial celebrity recognition system held by clarifai. com, our approach significantly diminishes the average prediction accuracy of the system to only 15. 40%, which is on par with the attack that transfers adversarial examples from a pre-trained Arcface model. Our code is publicly available at: https: //github. com/qizhangli/nobox-attacks.

v2026.09.13